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Yes, it's a goddamn railgun. I am not an electrical engineer, nor do I aspire to be, but this kind of thing interests me greatly and come on railguns are awesome.

Therefore, if you're going to tell me I did it horribly horribly wrong and should be shot for my horrendous bastardization of science, that's cool, but do realize I wasn't trying to build a working railgun (electricity isn't even implemented) but rather something completely awesome and ridiculous in scale that resembles one as accurately as possible.

(This disclaimer inspired by the fine folks of the #bay12games IRC. :V)

Point of Interest: Just to make the point...

...that the gun is indomitable, the ballistae (masterwork parts, all 12, with steel arrowheads) face away from its field of fire. - RatOfWisdom

There are 3 comments for this map series, last post 2010-09-07
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Points of Interest

Sitting defiantly atop the hollow, ziggurat-like command center (so built to allow shouted orders to echo nicely) is a masterwork platinum statue of Ézum Ducimkeshan Komanethmardes Rít, the first (and only) champion to fall in a siege.

...Well, no, this is 40d and statues aren't of anything in particular. But it's nicely dramatic.

Other statues adorn the tops of the firing chamber and munitions bays, but no other statue holds the artifact spears Limtenshed (platinum) and Rithlutthetust Kiron Stettad (rose gold), in parallel with the massive steel rails that will facilitate the piercing and subsequent utter destruction of the goblin tower directly to the east, as Ézum's armor was pierced by goblin arrows.

Here sit the Rail Operators (the bright green levers control the positive rail and connecting pin, the dark green levers the negative) and Water Engineer (bright blue for inflow, dark for outflow), commanded by the Marx Engineer (the light blue lever), all behind their lovely sparkling gem screens. Also shown: the artifact hatch that bars passage to the command center's crest.

I tried to get the screens to flash in a old-school computer sort of way, by using dump zones to control the distance of specific gems to the build sites, but apparently dorfs don't care about that when selecting what to grab first. Gems are grabbed in a fixed order (unknown in specifics, though it's not alphabetic at least: for instance fire agate was grabbed, then yellow jasper, then aventurine), but gems acquired in trade are grabbed first. The order does appear to correspond to the flashing as well as to the order of the gems when viewed with the [t]-menu. /shrug
- RatOfWisdom

Each Slug Loader has a color-coded munitions bay assigned to them, the levers to open which are accessible by flipping either of the levers behind the northernmost station, where sits the Munitions Commander. (This is the most practical version I could wrangle of the double-key nuke launch thing.) The lever in front of that station controls the gate to the firing chamber, where the loader walks between the masterwork platinum statues (yay, traffic zones) and dumps a single steel block slug on the artifact hatch. (The MC gets a table, too, for recording supply levels.)

The Ballistics Commander sits at the southernmost station, with no important levers but lots of tables for calculating power loads and trajectories and what have you. He commands the three Electrical Engineers that work in the power room behind him, who can vary the power plant's output by engaging all the generators at once (the light blue lever), in groups of three (bright blue) or individually (dark blue).

Finally, once the munitions bays and firing chamber have been re-sealed, the gun is powered up and the rails are in position, the Railgun Commander in the center releases the final lever from his artifact throne, dropping the slug between the very back of the rails.
- RatOfWisdom

This is as close as dorfs get to the business end of the gun. There are steel floodgates in the final gaps in the wire, connecting to the rails themselves which are composed entirely of raising steel block bridges.

The bridges raise towards the center of the rail, so their conductivity can be improved by lubricating the gap with freshly-crushed goblins and their equipment =D The rails also double as execution towers when lowered.

Engineering is sealed by a triple floodgate airlock. The left lever closes the previous gate and the right one opens the next. (May re-work this to use raising bridges and fewer levers, if I can do it without crushing anyone.)
- RatOfWisdom

Partly because my design didn't allow for the space without extending uselessly upwards, and partly because I doubt dorfs give much of a shit about corona discharge, the spark gaps are just bits of wire with air in between.

The first one is triggered by removing the floodgates (wooden, as wood presumably has a lower conductivity than air, and because I like the character for wood floodgates better than the X for stone ones). Presumably a floodgate also fills the entire tile, as they're so effective at blocking liquid.

I may go back and replace all the gaps with floodgates, but for now I was interested in distinguishing the first one from the others.
- RatOfWisdom

This is the bit that gave me the biggest technical headache. I may have taken quite a few liberties with real Marx generators (I am not an electrical engineer and know barely more about building this sort of thing than high-school science students), but then again this is the game that allows perpetual-motion waterwheels. I'd like to think dorfs are just that good.

Resistors are charcoal (I was going to use nickel silver, which has a greater impedance than copper, but someone in the IRC channel advised me otherwise) and capacitors are 3x3x3 blocks again, two layers of silver (indistinguishable from the dolomite blocks comprising the casings) separated by mica blocks.

(I understand that silver-mica capacitors do not have a particularly high energy density, nor a nicely dwarfy potential for catastrophic failure like some kinds Wikipedia describes, but in the end the most accurately replicable kind won out. Maybe the dwarfs don't know there are capacitors better suited to pulsed power applications.)
- RatOfWisdom

Copper walls constitute the vast majority of the gun's conductive components; I imagine I'd have been able to specify positive and negative terminals a little more accurately if DF was built for this sort of thing. Again, use your imagination.
- RatOfWisdom

There were initially some more waterwheels, for a total of 160000 in power, attached to the 15 gears that link to the generators above, but I neglected to remember that I'd be disabling those before starting the gun. (Oddly enough it required my saving and re-loading for the wheels in question to collapse. =/) The whole thing only requires a maximum of 3700 power or so, though, so no big deal.
- RatOfWisdom

DF being DF, water flow is pretty temperamental to maintain in this kind of construction. When the southern outflow is opened, it creates a pretty waterfall behind a bunch of gem windows. May actually remove those and put some grates in so the dorfs can benefit from the mist.
- RatOfWisdom

Not really a pump stack so much as a set of terraces, as I was trying to not have to alter my admittedly far too large farm complex, so the water moves horizontally as well as vertically. High wind meant I only needed one windmill per level. To the left of farms: the ground wire, leading off to the north where it sinks into the ground a good distance from anything vital and goes all the way to the bottom of the map.
- RatOfWisdom